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By Root 1431 0

saved is a centavo earned. It is a comfort to discover within the mysteries of the cartel the same attention to small sums that operates in the family budget. At times, the ledger seems like the butler’s accounting in some large English manor house. And even some of the unclear things—the listing of people with code names, the assignment of money to unexplained functions—these arcane matters remind one of the techniques of modern corporate accounting, where costs have vague descriptions and where losses spin off into separate funds with baffling names. Of course, there are some puzzles in the tallies released by the army. There seems to be no payment listed for the army, an oversight that staggers belief. Nor is there one for the federal police or for the state police, two outfits no sound drug merchant would leave out of his personnel plan. Then there is the opaque reference to what may be the press. I have a friend in Juárez who refuses to take payments from the cartel and so, even though he spent years working on the city’s newspapers, he is now virtually unemployable because, as he explained to me, “Now if you don’t take their money, they kill you.”

At best, the information released by the army gives one a peek and no more into the money machine of the drug industry. For example, given the murder rate in the city over the past fifteen years, it is eye-opening that the ledger contains no entry for homicide, a basic requirement of the business. Nor is there a bribe schedule for U.S. agents, though it has been proven in U.S. courts time after time that such elements of American law enforcement demand payment for aiding the shipment of drugs into the republic.

Still, it is a help, this partial ledger, like finding some rare manuscript from the ancient world that has survived the hurly-burly of life and speaks, as if from a tomb, of things that normally are beyond our comprehension.

She began to notice little items in the Juárez papers in 1993. Esther Chávez Cano was then a retired corporate accountant who had worked for Kraft in Mexico. The body has been sodomized, strangled, and beaten. The body is half naked, raped, stabbed. The little items kept flowing, dead girls left in the dirt. Nothing much is done.

Besides, women count more in Mexican beer commercials than on Mexican streets. Until 1953, they were not allowed to vote. Until the 1990s, they could not legally hold a job outside the house without their husband’s permission. Today, there are thirty-one Mexican states, and in all of them, if, say, a twelve-year-old girl announces that she’s been raped, well, she first has to prove she is “chaste and pure.” Statutory rape charges are forgiven in twelve states if the man marries the girl—though he then often simply walks out on the obligation. And of course, there is the concept of rapto, or bride abduction, which means a man carries a woman off, has sex with her, and then either marries or dumps her, or does both. I once lived in a little place in Mexico where the potato chip salesman carried off a teenager—but then brought her back as unsatisfactory. She was in a state of mild disgrace, and when she walked down the street, I’d hear mothers tell their daughters not to look at her, but to pretend she did not exist.

Esther Chávez waded into this world and by 1999 had founded Casa Amiga, a shelter for abused women in Juárez. That first year, she handled 250 clients. In 2007, the clinic treated 27,400. Of course, since Casa Amiga is the only shelter in the city and in the state, the numbers reflect who can manage the long bus ride to her building more than the actual level of violence against women in the city.

She lives in a cul-de-sac in Juárez in a very nice neighborhood, and now she is seventy-two years old, battling cancer, and still driving each day to the shelter and pursuing the work. The slaughter of women continues, as does the slaughter of men. She is the gatekeeper on the city’s savagery against women. And she is very tiny.

Her small house has two bedrooms, a warm kitchen, and a large living room with